Since reading The 4-Hour Work Week, which to me is a decent manual on creating a personal results-oriented work environment, I’ve been trying to implement more and more of it in my life. During the Thanksgiving holiday I spent two weeks away from my home office with nothing more than my phone and laptop. Most of my business was already done by email, and the phone calls I did receive are sent to me as audio files attached to emails, so no problems there. None of my clients knew I was in Southern Utah and then Southern California, 6-12 hours away from where I normally work.
The one problem I ran into was checking the mail and depositing checks, and I’m wondering if there’s some sort of service out there that will open my mail for me and deposit checks for me.
I have a check scanner that allows me to deposit checks from anywhere with an Internet connection, but it’s not the most portable thing, and if I don’t have the checks with me then it’s pointless to take it anywhere. I could forward my mail, but that requires knowing where you’re going to be ahead of time and isn’t at all what I’m looking for. I could force my clients to pay electronically but that also isn’t a viable solution because it’s not what my clients are used to nor what they would prefer to do.
What I need is a special address I can give out to clients so that they send payment to that address, and at that address is a company that will open the envelopes and deposit the checks for me and send me a scan of the check.
But imagine this–what if this service received all of your mail, and then you could login to a site each day and view scans of your mail, and then you have options of what to do with it? You could “delete” certain pieces which would send them to the shredder, forward other pieces to a certain address via USPS, have others overnighted to you via FedEx, or have them open other pieces and scan the contents of it for you to view online.
I’d be willing to pay $50 per month for this service in a heartbeat. If someone knows of a service like this let me know, or feel free to take my idea and run with it.
